The linguistic future of the Internet 229
some 8 billion messages sent worldwide in August 2000, 15 billion
in December, and a steady lowering of the age of phone users –
two-thirds of 14- to 16-year-olds have their own phone, and 10- to
11-year-olds are the fastest growing market. It is a cheaper medium
thanconventionalvoicecalling,andamoreprivatemedium,inthat
users can communicate without their conversation aurally disturb-
ing other people they happen to be with. A Mori/Lycos UK survey
published in September 2000 showed that 81% of mobile phone
users between the ages of 15 and 24 were usingtheir phone for
sending text messages, typically to co-ordinate their social lives, to
engage in language play, to flirt, or just to send a ‘thinking of you’
message. Apparently, 37% of all messagers have used the service
to tell someone they love them. At the same time, reports suggest
that the service is being used for other purposes, such as sexual
harassment, school bullying, political rumour-mongering, and in-
teraction between drug dealers and clients.
The challenge of the small screen size and its limited character
space (about 160 characters), as well as the small keypad, has mo-
tivated the evolution of an even more abbreviated language than
emerged in chatgroups and virtual worlds (see also p. 84). Some
of the same abbreviations appear, either because of their ‘obvi-
ous’ rebus-like potential (e.g.NE1,2day,B4,C U l8r[‘later’], and
Z [‘said’]) or because the generally youthful population of users
were familiar with Netspeak shorthand in its other situations (e.g.
Msg[‘message’],BRB[‘be right back’]). Basic smileys (p. 36) are
also used. Capital letters can be given syllabic values, as inthN
[‘then’] andnEd[‘need’]. But the medium has motivated some
new forms (e.g.c%l[‘cool’]) and its own range of direct-address
items, such asF2T[‘free to talk?’],Mob[‘mobile’],PCM[‘please
call me’],MMYT[‘Mail me your thoughts’], andRUOK[‘are you
OK?’]. Multi-word sentences and sequences of response utterances,
especially of a stereotyped kind, can be reduced to a sequence of
initial letters:SWDYT[‘So what do you think?’],BCBC[‘Beggars
can’t be choosers’],BTDT[‘Been there, done that’],YYSSW[‘Yeah,
yeah, sure, sure, whatever’],HHOJ[‘Ha, ha, only joking’]. Users
seem to be aware of the information value of consonants as